Andrew Jensen

What’s a little more uncertainty among friends?
If there’s anything the Alaska resource industry has been certain about over the past four years, it’s uncertainty.
There was a huge sigh of relief Nov. 6 as the ill-conceived Ballot Measure 1 known as the Stand for Salmon initiative was shot down by a 2-1 margin and it appeared at the time that Republicans would regain control of the House of Representatives following a chaotic two-year rule by a Democrat-led coalition most notable for its endless tax proposals and three freshmen members either resigning or not seeking reelection for their unacceptable conduct toward women.
That pair of election results combined with the decisive win by Mike Dunleavy against Mark Begich seemed to cement at least a two-year respite from the constant trips to Juneau for resource industry representatives to deal with every hare-brained attempt by House Resource Committee co-chairs Geran Tarr and Andy Josephson to raise oil production taxes.
Gov. Bill Walker, who introduced a few oil tax increases of his own, never tamped down the worst inclinations of the House majority to keep fiddling with a tax system that not only produced revenue even as prices bottomed out but encouraged the industry to keep investing even as it lost billions of dollars.
Most of the GOP House members quickly assembled on Nov. 7 to declare themselves the majority and Rep. Dave Talerico of Healy as the Speaker of the House.
That started unraveling almost immediately as Valley gadfly Rep. David Eastman — who was censured by the House in 2017 for comments about rural Alaska women on the floor and stripped of his Ethics Subcommittee post in 2018 for leaking the existence of a confidential complaint to a reporter for this newspaper — declared he hadn’t decided whether to cast his vote for Talerico as Speaker.
The caucus became even shakier as votes continued to be tallied in House District 1 in Fairbanks, where Republican Barton LeBon’s 79-vote lead on Election Night turned into a 10-vote deficit to Democrat Kathryn Dodge on Nov. 13 with the count to resume Nov. 16.
A LeBon loss would produce a 20-20 split and set off a storm of wheeling and dealing by both sides to assemble a majority caucus.
On the federal level, the Democrat takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives will no doubt produce gridlock, a flurry of subpoenas for the Trump administration and brinksmanship on government shutdowns, but for the resource development industry the effect should be fairly muted as there is little they can do to stop deregulation, the Executive Branch push for energy dominance or the pending opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Pending projects such as Greater Mooses Tooth-2, Hilcorp’s Liberty offshore development and the Donlin gold mine have their key federal permits in hand, and a large-scale plan is being crafted for ConocoPhillips’ promising Willow prospect in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
All in all, Alaska has about 400,000 barrels per day of production in some stage of permitting or construction that could come online in the early- to mid-2020s.
Prices have been slipping lately, but the roughly $10 spread between Brent crude — to which Alaska North Slope oil is pegged — and West Texas Intermediate appears to be holding steady and makes the state an attractive place to invest by more than offsetting the transportation costs for getting it to market.
If the Dunleavy administration follows through with its plans for real budget reform and sets a tone that restores credibility with the investor community, Alaska has a chance to set itself on a sounder footing while buoyed by an increase in oil prices that could considerably narrow the budget gap, at least temporarily.
The state’s resource industry has good reason for optimism, and if LeBon pulls out the win in District 1 the state business climate will be well positioned for a way out of this lingering recession.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

Most situations in life can be summed up by a quote from Seinfeld or Yogi Berra, and Election Night 2018 was no exception.
One from Berra captures it nicely: “It’s getting late early.”
After holding high aspirations of defeating Mike Dunleavy following incumbent Gov. Bill Walker’s decision to drop out and throw his support behind Mark Begich, and teased by polling and fundraising into thinking political neophyte Alyse Galvin had a chance of knocking off 23-term incumbent and Dean of the U.S. House Don Young, Democrat hopes were dashed almost immediately.
The first set of results gave the Republican Dunleavy a lead of about 6,500; Young led by more than 4,000 and Begich-endorsed Ballot Measure 1, aka Stand for Salmon, trailed by 19,000.
Berra also once said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
Well, it was over.
After the first round of returns it was only a matter of how large the final margins would be, and whether Republicans could retake the majority in the state House after a two-year hiatus in the minority while a Democrat-led coalition aided by RINOs Paul Seaton, Louise Stutes and Gabrielle LeDoux pushed for higher taxes on oil and new taxes on income.
At the end of the night it appears the GOP will indeed claim House majority status in Juneau after all its incumbents won, Seaton was defeated soundly by Sarah Vance and coalition member Jason Grenn, an Anchorage independent, was unseated by Sara Rasmussen thanks in part to the presence of perennial candidate Dustin Darden pulling nearly 800 votes on the District 22 ballot.
The night was essentially a clean sweep other than the still uncertain outcome in Senate District A in Fairbanks where Senate President Pete Kelly, the Republican incumbent, leads by just 11 votes over his Democrat challenger Rep. Scott Kawasaki, whose vacated seat seems headed to Republican control in a major flip for the party with a win by Barton LeBon.
While national Democrats celebrated taking over the U.S. House of Representatives and President Donald Trump happily endorsed Republican punching bag Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, the blue party took a shellacking in Alaska.
Begich, apparently so stunned by how badly he was beaten by Dunleavy, took no calls on Election Night and as of 10 a.m. on Nov. 7 still hadn’t issued a statement on his Facebook, Twitter or official campaign pages, the latter of which still touts his lead in the Alaska Survey Research poll by Ivan Moore as his most recent post.
The former Anchorage mayor and single-term U.S. senator who was defeated by current Sen. Dan Sullivan in 2014 is largely regarded as a pretty smooth politician, but there can be no doubt he miscalculated terribly by jumping on the Stand for Salmon bandwagon while it was still a three-way race for governor.
In a political move so transparent it would attract bird strikes, Begich’s attempt to draw votes from Walker, who opposed the measure, backfired spectacularly.
With a margin of nearly 21,000 votes and 98 percent of precincts in, the outcome for governor may have been a foregone conclusion regardless, but it became inevitable when the once reliably pro-resource development Begich turned off so many potential supporters with his position on Stand for Salmon.
Nor did it help that Begich was in favor of taxing all of Alaskans in order to extract some revenue from a couple thousand out-of-state North Slope workers.
One thing slightly less short-lived than Begich’s campaign was the House bipartisan coalition that must be the briefest in Alaska history.
We’re a long way from the gleeful press conference Nov. 9, 2016, when the majority caucus was announced.
Since then, the “Wack Pack” of Reps. Dean Westlake, Zach Fansler and Justin Parrish are all out after a series of transgressions ranging from sexual harassment to assault against women in Juneau; and the basically unflappable Rep. Sam Kito quit the caucus late in this past session after growing sick of LeDoux’s high-handed rule over the Rules Committee.
While there may be a place for Stutes in the to-be-formed GOP House majority, LeDoux should find herself in the wilderness after finally burning a bridge or two too many.
Alaskans chose a clear path on Election Day, and for the candidates from Dunleavy to Vance the easy part is over.
Delivering, as the Democrats found out, is a much tougher task.
^
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

The fact that Gov. Bill Walker and Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott need to pull votes from Mark Begich, the other Democrat in the race for governor, is no secret and it was therefore no surprise to see a press release out of Walker’s office on Sept. 20 announcing their opposition to Brett Kavanaugh to join the U.S. Supreme Court.
After declaring Kavanaugh “does not demonstrate a commitment to legal precedent that protects working families,” whatever that means, and stopping just short of asserting he favors repealing the Alaska Statehood Act, the so-called “independent/Alaska first/unity” ticket went lower than a North Slope drill bit:
“Finally, we believe a thorough review of past allegations against Mr. Kavanaugh is needed before a confirmation vote takes place. Violence against women in Alaska is an epidemic. We do not condone placing someone into one of our nation’s highest positions of power while so many key questions remain unanswered.”
Opposition to Kavanaugh — even on nothing more than the pure partisan basis we saw before his name was released or uncorroborated allegations from his high school years were dropped on him like slime at a Nickelodeon awards show at the last possible moment — is one thing.
It is quite another to conflate the unsubstantiated charges against Kavanaugh with the documented, ongoing and as-yet unchecked problem of violence against women in Alaska that Walker and Mallott describe as an epidemic.
Walker and Mallott refer to this epidemic as if they are mere bystanders to the problem and not the most powerful person in Alaska and one of the most respected Native leaders in the state, respectively.
What, exactly, have Walker and Mallott done to address or even reduce violence against Alaska women and children? And what, exactly, does Kavanaugh have to do with any of it?
Mallott, for his part, appears more interested in climate change than actually changing the climate for women and girls in rural Alaska.
After nearly four years of their administration, virtually nothing has improved, they’re offering no hope that it will, and yet they are using an unsolved issue they have the ability to do something about as the basis to attack Kavanaugh.
Oh, but they just want the questions answered, as if that matters after they’d already come up with a series of bizarre allegations about his legal views that aren’t backed up by either Sen. Lisa Murkowski or Sen. Dan Sullivan, whose wife is an Alaska Native.
How difficult would it be for anyone who went to high school with Walker or Mallott to make up a similar charge against them as has been leveled against Kavanaugh? How would they, their wives and their children feel if suddenly they had to defend themselves against a horrific allegation with no date, place or even a year for which to present a defense?
How would they react to calls to drop out of the race for governor, or to suspend their campaign until a thorough investigation of a charge with no possible defense other than a denial was available?
We are going down a dangerous road here where a person in the public eye for decades can be destroyed over such an unprovable accusation after being the subject of not one, not two, but six FBI background checks over the years that, yes, include interviews with high school and college acquaintances.
If the GOP falls for this scam they can kiss the Senate goodbye, or if they manage to hold it thanks to the difficult battleground facing Democrats in 10 states won by President Donald Trump, they can expect nothing short of a repeat of this character assassination against Kavanaugh on any other nominee.
Just imagine what’s going to happen if Trump has an opportunity to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
This will look like the good ol’ days.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

The backers of the Stand for Salmon ballot initiative well understand the power of pitting Alaskans against quote-unquote Outsiders.
The phrase “foreign mining corporations” is used no fewer than six times on the “Get the Facts” page on their website.
One particularly strident sentence reads: “In order to protect our Alaskan way of life, we need to support this initiative and not buy what the dishonest foreign mining corporations have to sell.”
Stand for Salmon Campaign Director Ryan Schryver used the occasion of a minor fine against the measure’s opponents to accuse them of trying to fool voters by not adding the words “Vote No on One” to their organization’s Stand for Alaska name promptly enough after the initiative was certified in March.
“They have to create distrust and confusion to be successful,” he told the Anchorage Daily News.
That is a particularly rich charge for an organization that created the ultimate bumper sticker slogan to promote its ballot measure.
While the Stand for Salmon proponents attempt to paint the opposition as foreign interlopers into Alaska’s affairs, they are hardly being transparent when it comes to the source of their funding.
The top contributors include the Alaska Conservation Foundation, the Alaska Center, Cook Inletkeeper, the Wild Salmon Center and Salmon State. The initiative itself was crafted by environmental law firm Trustees for Alaska, which is well known for its legal activism against resource development in the state.
According to campaign disclosures, about $730,000 of the $1.1 million in reported contributions to the effort are classified as non-monetary, with the Alaska Center topping the list at $357,000 followed by the Washington, D.C.-based New Venture Fund that employs Schryver at $227,000.
Cook Inletkeeper is next at about $83,000 in non-monetary contributions to the effort.
If money from outside the state is dirty, then all these groups with “Alaska” in their names hardly have clean hands.
Trustees for Alaska lists 14 foundations as its top donors in its 2017 annual report, with only one having any staff based here and that one, the Leighty Foundation, was founded by a family from Waterloo, Iowa, but reported a Juneau address in its most recent IRS Form 990.
The 14 most recent 990s for those groups show about $339,000 in donations to Trustees for Alaska.
The Venn diagram of Trustees for Alaska foundation donors overlaps nearly perfectly with those to the groups backing the Stand for Salmon initiative.
The Alaska Center received $255,000 in donations from the same foundations that back Trustees for Alaska in the most recent year according to the Form 990s.
It has also received another $245,000 from the New Venture Fund for a total of a half-million dollars in “Outside” money in the most recent year forms are available.
Cook Inletkeeper received about $260,000 in donations from the New Venture Fund and the Trustees for Alaska foundation donors.
These 14 foundations collectively hold about $463 million in assets according to their most recent 990s, with the New Venture Fund adding another $230 million for nearly $700 million total.
What these groups have in common is their fight against resource development of all kinds in addition to the money that insulates them from the consequences of the policies they are trying to implement around the country.
All the groups with Alaskan addresses are a handy vehicle to carry through money in order to advance the goals of these non-Alaska foundations, with the added benefit of those organizations not having to disclose how they are contributing nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in “non-monetary” resources to an effort that will undoubtedly cost the state jobs if it passes.
As just one example, the 444 S Foundation based in Bellevue, Wash., donated $115,000 to the Alaska Center and $60,000 to Trustees for Alaska in 2016, with another $100,000 to the New Venture Fund.
What is the 444 S Foundation? Besides being endorsed by the Sierra Club, Code Pink and the socialist Working Families Organization, its executive director is Fred Munson, who is also a member of the Arctic Defense Fund advisory council, which dispersed funds to support the “kayaktivists” who blockaded Shell in Seattle in 2015 and later hung from bridges in Portland trying to prevent its outer continental shelf drilling.
Arctic Defense Fund was created by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Sustainable Market Solutions, whose principal officer is Jay Halfon, a professional litigator for Earthworks and well known “frackivist” leading the fights against the U.S. energy boom in natural gas.
The point is not that there is anything wrong with these foundations contributing their money to the causes they support. And to be clear, their opponents have vastly outraised Stand for Salmon by a 9-1 margin so far.
Rather, it is disingenuous to the nth degree for the supporters of Stand for Salmon to attack the companies that are being completely open about their donations while theirs come from groups in Boston, New York, DC and San Francisco who belong to the “keep it in the ground” movement that are rightly distrusted by those who live and work here.
Admitting they take money from outside foundations as a means to even up the odds, even slightly, would at least be an honest argument.
But that’s probably too much to expect when it comes to politics.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

Among the many subjects that regularly earn Republicans a mocking from Democrats and their media sympathizers, perhaps none rank as highly as claims about election fraud.
Attempts to secure the voting franchise through requirements for ID are universally decried as racist and based on bogeyman conspiracy theories about the dead or otherwise ineligible casting ballots.
In House District 15, where Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux now holds an insurmountable lead of 113 votes over her inert challenger Aaron Weaver, a case is now emerging that voter fraud indeed took place.
Seven dead people requested absentee ballots from beyond the grave. At least two others confirmed ballots returned in their names were not cast by them. A total of 26 absentee ballots — all cast for LeDoux — are now under investigation by the Division of Elections and the Criminal Division of the Department of Law.
Fewer than 600 ballots were cast on Aug. 21 during the GOP primary election, with Weaver waking up to a three-vote edge, 294-291, after he went to bed without even bothering to follow the results as they began posting around 9:15 p.m.
LeDoux crushed Weaver in the absentee count conducted Aug. 28 and now leads 452-339, but a strong whiff of corruption hovers over her apparent victory thanks to what appears to be a systematic effort to game the system.
At the center of it is LeDoux’s Hmong outreach contractor Charlie Chang of Fresno, Calif., who she’s enlisted in each of her House District 15 competitions and was paid nearly $12,000 in July for get-out-the-vote efforts in the Muldoon neighborhood of Anchorage.
Three components are central to any type of legal investigation: motive, means and opportunity.
Every one of those elements fits LeDoux and Chang in House District 15.
In her own statement denying any wrongdoing issued Aug. 28, LeDoux hit on motive: “District 15 is a very low turnout district.”
A low turnout district means every vote is crucial, as was evident on election night with a margin of just three votes between LeDoux and Weaver.
The means and opportunity fit as well as a substantial number of the ballots in question are linked to a narrow range of addresses in Muldoon where Chang’s outreach is focused.
Finally, in the mother of all coincidences, every ballot under review was cast for LeDoux.
Whether LeDoux faces any legal jeopardy seems unlikely absent a claim by Chang he was instructed to do anything improper, and the investigation is in too early of a stage to speculate on whether he did anything wrong, either.
But there is another element of investigations — “Cui bono,” Latin for “who benefits?” — that clearly does not favor LeDoux.
Something fishy went down in Muldoon, and the investigation must proceed expeditiously with the general election coming up Nov. 6 and the state Republican Party now deciding to attempt an actual effort to defeat LeDoux after basically sitting out the primary against one of its biggest and easily best-funded targets.
The broader issue at play, though, is the routinely overlooked aspect of Democrat fights against election integrity.
Claims that Republicans are trying to disenfranchise minority voters ignore the very real competing impact of voter fraud: the disenfranchisement of those whose legal votes are canceled out by illegal ones.
It is no less an act of disenfranchisement to deny the vote to some by allowing the ineligible or deceased to vote — through negligence or corruption — as it is to deny access to the voting booth in the first place.
The Division of Elections deserves credit for flagging these irregularities, which officials obviously believe bear enough signs of intentional fraud to warrant a criminal investigation.
LeDoux may rightly believe there is no evidence that will implicate her in whatever events took place to result in every questioned ballot being a vote for her.
She shouldn’t be as confident that this dark cloud won’t follow her into November.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

Forgive two movie references between the headline and this lede, but Everything is Awesome if turnout is any indication about how Alaskans are feeling about the state of the state.
Recession, unemployment, negative migration, addiction, crime and the Permanent Fund Dividend have dominated the news and internet comments for the past three years, yet fewer than 1 in 5 Alaskans cast ballots in the Aug. 21 primary.
There are plenty of good reasons for that. The Democrat race for governor was essentially uncontested, there was no U.S. Senate race or ballot initiatives, the incumbent Gov. Bill Walker wasn’t on the ballot and as usual many House and Senate races had fewer choices than an election in North Korea.
As expected, former state Sen. Mike Dunleavy crushed latecomer and former Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell in the GOP primary by a 2-1 margin. Treadwell, who vastly overestimated his name recognition and ability to parachute into the race at the filing deadline as a last-ditch alternative to Dunleavy for the party establishment, sang a song of sour grapes as the results came in.
"We have to bring the Republican Party together because right now the ideas that we brought forward on trying to save jobs, build jobs in this economy, having experienced people run this thing, we did not get very much attention,” Treadwell told the Anchorage Daily News. “The biggest issue was who was tallest."
Unconstrained by holding any elected office, Treadwell had more than a year to run, make his case and raise money to earn the GOP nod — there was even a gap where Dunleavy suspended his campaign for health reasons — but he apparently believed he could stroll to a win in a couple months if only he’d gotten more attention.
Note to Mead: You can’t beat something with nothing, and looking for scapegoats anywhere but the mirror is a bigger waste of time than your short-lived campaign.
But back to the turnout, which while largely explainable was baffling in a few notable contested races.
In Eagle River, the race to fill former Sen. Anna MacKinnon’s seat between two well-known politicians was a blowout win for Rep. Lora Reinbold over Rep. Dan Saddler by nearly 800 votes but fewer than 5,000 people voted in a district of nearly 29,000 registered voters.
In House District 25, House Minority Leader Charisse Millett was sacked by newcomer Josh Revak with neither accumulating even 1,000 votes. With turnout of just 11 percent, Revak had a lead of 916 to 685 in a district with more than 14,000 voters.
But wait, it gets worse.
Over in Muldoon, House Rules Chair and the Legislature’s most prolific fundraiser Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux couldn’t even turn out 300 people to vote for her.
She ended the night trailing by 3 votes, 294-291, and may yet pull out a win, but it is still a pathetic showing for the would-be kingmaker.
LeDoux and Millett, who both voted for fully funding the PFD this past session, may well go down to defeat, and even in races where candidates made it an issue the results were decidedly mixed.
Paying a “full” dividend is just not an animating issue for the majority of Alaskans, despite what Dunleavy’s win might indicate.
The issue did appear to bite a member of the Senate Majority leadership with Peter Miccicche trailing by 12 votes in his race on the Kenai Peninsula.
But like Millett, his loss, if it holds, can just as easily be blamed on complacency as a reduced PFD that is still bigger than all but seven that have been paid in state history.
Whether the internet-amplified anger over the PFD translates to a Legislature that will send a formula-funded dividend to the governor’s desk remains to be seen, but if Tuesday was any indication the issue did not drive turnout in any race.
The math of a three-way contest rather than the math of calculating the PFD still appears to be the most decisive factor heading into November.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

This defense of free speech isn’t going to begin with the obligatory preamble denouncing Alex Jones.
Over the past week, Jones and his Infowars site were simultaneously sent to timeouts of various lengths ranging from 30 days to three months from Facebook and YouTube while Spotify and Apple took down multiple podcasts from Jones’ show.
Twitter — perhaps shamed by the daily exposure of the hate it tolerates from the left highlighted by recent New York Times editorial board hire and open racist Sarah Jeong — has refused to follow suit despite pressure to deplatform Jones.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who himself succumbed to the left-wing online outrage mob earlier this year after he made the mistake of posting about eating at Chik-fil-A, did manage to nail the obvious problem with banishing Jones.
Dorsey posted that Twitter will not take “one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term, and adding fuel to new conspiracy theories.”
Bingo.
There’s an old joke that goes, “just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get me.”
In a fell swoop of virtue-signaling, Facebook, YouTube (Google), Spotify and Apple made a “feel good” decision to silence Jones that is likely the biggest gift he could have ever asked for.
What’s unlikely is that the disciples of net neutrality realize they are cheering on the tech titans for actions that are the polar opposite of their claimed desire for a free and open internet where content is treated equally.
But then again, self-awareness isn’t a quality generally possessed by progressives now tolerating, encouraging or outright embracing the violence of the “antifa” movement that’s made its mission to shut down any speech falling to the right side of Mao on the ideological spectrum.
Because make no mistake: this isn’t going to stop with Jones. The term “alt-right” has been used for more than two years now to degrade and delegitimize the supporters of President Donald Trump as a basket of deplorable racists.
These tech corporations are carrying out the censorship that the left cannot achieve at the ballot box or the Supreme Court and have crossed the Rubicon into the territory of policing speech that goes far beyond the unprotected category of incitement to violence.
They have every right to boot Jones from their platforms, temporarily or permanently, if they choose. But they’re going to need to hire a whole lot more cheap foreign H1-B interns if they are going to equally police content that falls in the category of “offensive” or “hateful.”
I’ll pause so you can stop laughing.
The Facebook page “Occupy Democrats” has 7.4 million followers and has a typically hyperbolic photo up featuring Uncle Sam that states “If you still support Donald Trump and plan to vote for him again, you are a traitor!”
Quick quiz: what’s the federal penalty for treason?
Answer: the death penalty.
Follow up: what are the odds Occupy Democrats ever gets its account suspended for “bullying” or “hate speech”?
Answer: zero.
And the press, the supposed protectors of free speech, formed their own outrage mob last week when they pressured the Newseum in Washington, D.C., to stop selling T-shirts that said “You are very fake news” in its gift shop.
This tweet from Boston Globe Deputy DC Editor Matt Viser perfectly illustrates the recent twisting of the First Amendment protection of the press into some sort of blasphemy law: “This T-shirt doesn’t belong anywhere. It particularly doesn’t belong at the @Newseum, a place that celebrates journalism and has the First Amendment etched in stone outside its building.”
Viser clearly wasn’t the one respondent out of 1,000 in a recent survey that could name all five protections spelled out in the First Amendment.
The press coined the term “fake news” in the aftermath of the 2016 election as a way to explain the loss of the inevitable Hillary Clinton and are now outraged that it has been co-opted and turned against them.
What’s obvious is that their issue is not with the term itself, but with their inability to control whom it is aimed against.
This is an industry that spent the past 20 years attacking and attempting to marginalize Fox News. They are members of a progressive movement that dubbed the network “Faux News” long ago, with Urban Dictionary entries on the term dating to 2003.
They were the dutiful stenographers for President Barack Obama, who routinely called out his perceived enemies in the press by name from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh to Glenn Beck to Sean Hannity.
None rushed to the defense of conservatives, and there was certainly no collective outrage about a president attacking the press as there is today about Trump.
While there is plenty of hand-wringing over the supposed misleading information and conspiracies from the likes of Jones being pushed on the fringes of the internet, the mainstream press so offended at being dubbed an “enemy of the people” has been pushing the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories for the past 18 months accusing Trump of colluding with Vladimir Putin to steal a presidential election.
This is the same press whose talking heads routinely compare Trump to Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao, who ironically were all leaders of the murderous left.
Of course, if that were true, Jim Acosta would be against a wall with a blindfold and a cigarette, but realizing that would take a well of historical knowledge deeper than a thimble and a better memory than a fruit fly.
In other words, don’t hold your breath.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

The establishment defenders of the global status quo are doubling down in their battle against President Donald Trump.
Citing trade and immigration, the Koch Bros. announced their intention to withhold support for Kevin Cramer against Democrat incumbent Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota in a key race the GOP seeks to flip in a state Trump won by 36 points.
They might as well save their money. For the one-time elites in the Republican pundit class, think tanks and Super PACs, it must be frustrating to realize their utter impotence to move the needle against Trump with GOP voters who back him by a nearly 9-1 margin.
Much like President Bushes 41 and 43 and failed Republican presidential candidates Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney — who, thanks to their criticism of Trump, have all enjoyed an image rehabilitation from the media and Democrats that once demonized them — the bogeymen Koch Bros. and their agenda of open borders for trade and immigration are aligning with the left.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is also investing heavily in an anti-tariff campaign, highlighting as an example the dilemma of craft brewers dealing with duties on aluminum imports in a July 26 post.
One can only wonder where the chamber was in the last decade as China began dumping below market price aluminum in the U.S. to ease the glut of overcapacity it built up as it went from 11 percent of global production in 2000 to more than half just 15 years later.
According to data from the Aluminum Association, “U.S. imports of semi-fabricated aluminum products from China grew 183 percent between 2012 through 2015 before leveling off (in 2016).”
The association notes that, “Eight U.S. based aluminum smelters have either closed or curtailed since 2014 meaning only five smelters are operating in the United States today and only two at full capacity. This represents the lowest level of U.S. production since just after World War II.”
This is the status quo the U.S. Chamber is trying to preserve and which Trump is trying to upend.
Tariffs are a negotiating tool, albeit a blunt one, but Trump was not elected to keep the Koch Bros. or the U.S. Chamber happy.
He promised to disrupt the system and negotiate better deals, and unlike most every other Republican politician who spent cycle after cycle pledging to repeal and replace Obamacare or enforce the border and immigration law, he is keeping those promises.
Of course there will be short-term pain for some sectors, either from retaliatory tariffs on American exports or higher costs for domestic manufacturers who still need steel and aluminum from foreign sources until the decimation of our industries can be reversed through restarting mills or opening new ones.
Another blunt tool wielded by Trump was the $12 billion proposal to aid the the agricultural sector facing those tit-for-tat tariffs as China and Mexico try to hit him in his red state bases.
That drew the ire of our own Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who complained that the Alaskan seafood industry wasn’t included despite its heavy reliance on trade with China that is largely comprised of fish being sent there for processing and then reentering the U.S. or other markets.
The question not being asked is why is it more economic to send product all the way to China for processing before it is sold in the U.S.? That work could and should be done here in Alaska. Copper River Seafoods operates a year-round processing plant in Anchorage that employs nearly 200 people producing fish for Walmart.
Avoiding a trade conflict with China will not answer that question or lead to more value-added processing in Alaska.
Nor does it make sense to abide a system in which we continue to pump hundreds of billions per year into a country that is building militarized islands in the South China Sea, waging cyber warfare and intellectual property theft against us and even threatening our airlines that won’t print its approved version of the map of Taiwan.
What Trump’s agri-bailout signaled to the world is that the U.S. is willing to take a punch in the course of winning the fight. It was also an action that couldn’t legitimately be criticized by other countries given their own subsidies, bailouts and protectionism for favored industries.
As a result, the European Union’s trade representative flew across the pond to Trump’s turf to start negotiating a solution.
Trump worked to find new markets in the EU for products like American soybeans hit by Chinese tariffs.
The Putin puppet is also trying to replace Russia as the dominant energy supplier to Europe.
The American energy sector, now the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, is also feeling the effect of the metal tariffs. The possible impact on the ultimate price of the Alaska LNG Project has been tossed around as well, but at the last board of directors meeting company executives reported they’d identified potential U.S. sources for rolled 42-inch steel pipe.
The demand for U.S. energy isn’t going anywhere even if there are intermediate increases in costs.
Sanctions are about to be reimposed on Iran with the U.S. set to cut off the despotic mullahs’ crude oil cash stream used to export terrorism and crush its people.
Supply is dwindling from the failed socialist state of Venezuela and there are ongoing production disruptions in the failed state of Libya created by former President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Trump is presiding over a U.S. economy with a booming energy sector, historically low unemployment, rising wages and soaring consumer confidence.
He’s negotiating from a position of strength with every intention to win while the Washington Generals that make up the GOP establishment and donor classes are trying to throw the game.
At least they’ll have their token Republican talking head slots on MSNBC as a consolation prize.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

The Journal was involved in two stories this past week we wanted no part of, but that ended up presenting a textbook case study in how and how not to practice journalism.
On Friday, July 13, Republican blogger Suzanne Downing put up a post under a click-bait headline of “Smoking Gun” accusing Gov. Bill Walker of breaking state law by submitting an opinion column with a link to a campaign video and the Journal and its parent newspaper the Anchorage Daily News of committing campaign finance violations by publishing it.
On Tuesday, July 17, the House Subcommittee on Ethics was presented with the deposition of former Journal reporter Naomi Klouda in the case against Rep. David Eastman, who was booted from the Ethics panel this session by a 31-6 vote based on a finding that he violated Alaska law by revealing the existence of an ethics complaint against Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux to Klouda on April 28, 2017.
The Journal’s involvement in the Eastman case began that day when Klouda did what real reporters do when they are presented with an allegation: she attempted to verify it.
In the case of Eastman, she was actually following his own advice when he told her that she should call the Legislative Ethics Office and ask Administrator Jerry Anderson about a complaint that had been filed within the previous week against LeDoux.
Unbeknownst to Klouda at the time, though Anderson would quickly make her aware, ethics complaints are confidential until they are resolved. Anderson informed her that he could neither confirm nor deny the existence of any complaint and asked who had told her about it.
Klouda, whose interview with Eastman was entirely on the record, told Anderson that he had told her to call the Ethics office and ask about LeDoux.
Because we could not confirm the existence of the complaint, and after Anderson informed us of the serious nature of anyone disclosing a pending complaint, we did not report Eastman’s allegation against LeDoux.
A couple weeks later, Klouda and I met with Anderson at his cramped Downtown Anchorage office where for the second of four times, including a deposition given under oath, she recounted in exact detail what Eastman told her that day.
Unlike Eastman, her version of events has never changed, and his attorney was left with nothing else but to attack her preservation of notes despite all the contemporaneous documentation at the time, the phone records that show she called Anderson immediately after talking to Eastman and Anderson’s own sworn testimony that all support Klouda’s account.
When we reported on the Ethics committee’s recommendation to remove Eastman this past January, LeDoux did confirm that a complaint had indeed been filed against her.
We learned on July 17 that the complaint had actually been filed April 27, 2017, the day before Eastman told Klouda to call the Ethics Office and ask about it.
The reason for the alarm expressed by Anderson on receiving Klouda’s inquiry the very day after a confidential complaint was filed suddenly became clear during the July 17 hearing.
Besides attacking Klouda’s notes by introducing the entirely irrelevant Reuters guidebook and inventing other standards for reporters out of thin air, Eastman’s attorney argued that it wasn’t reasonable to believe that he would do something so stupid as to violate the ethics law by telling her about a pending complaint against a fellow legislator.
Just because an action is stupid doesn’t mean people don’t do it, which brings us to Downing and the striking contrast with Klouda.
Without a shred of evidence, Downing accused the governor of using state resources to promote a campaign video and the Journal and ADN of being accomplices in the violation by publishing the column with the link to YouTube.
Downing didn’t contact ADN Opinion Editor Tom Hewitt to ask about the origin of the column or what the editorial policy is regarding submissions by candidates. Nor did she contact yours truly despite having my cell phone number.
Instead, she published a piece of fake news with no reporting and appointed herself as judge and jury of the Alaska Public Offices Commission to declare it was only a question of how many, not if any, legal violations took place.
Klouda attempted to verify an allegation before publishing it.
Downing made no attempt to verify her allegations.
When Klouda could not confirm the existence of a complaint, we did not publish the allegation.
Even after being informed that the Walker column came from the campaign and not from his state office, Downing has yet to correct or update her post as of the morning of July 18.
Klouda had no agenda when she called the Ethics Office to check on Eastman’s allegation.
Downing’s anti-Walker agenda is plastered all over her blog.
If the Journal shared Downing’s lack of standards, we could have reported Eastman’s allegation of a complaint and the details he described to Klouda along with the obligatory “could not confirm or deny” from Anderson.
We instead chose to be responsible and regardless of how the Ethics committee ultimately rules, Klouda’s effort to get the story right was presented in detail during the July 17 hearing as Eastman’s attorney was left with only an emotional misdirection about her credibility and a defense that boiled down to his client not being that dumb.
Downing won’t make that same argument but the next time you read one of her attacks on her ideological foes keep in mind her standards when she writes about her friends.
Editor's note: On July 19, the House Subcommittee on Legislative Ethics upheld its decision that Eastman violated the law by disclosing the existence of the complaint to Klouda.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

Democrats sure love to quote mob movies when they want to sound tough.
Back in 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama was at a fundraiser in Philadelphia when he referenced “the Chicago Way” as described by Sean Connery’s Jim Malone in “The Untouchables.”
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” said Obama, who rose to power from the Chicago political scene. “Because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”
There’s no need to imagine the sort of breathless pearl-clutching from so-called progressives had such a statement emanated from Obama’s opponent Sen. John McCain or his running mate and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
Just a few years later, a deranged individual who believed the government was using grammar as a means of mind control shot up a constituent gathering in Arizona hosted by Rep. Gabby Giffords.
Before the blood dried or the bodies of the six killed turned cold, the fingers were being pointed at Palin for inspiring the shooter because she’d included Giffords’ district in a standard-issue map of targeted congressional seats.
The disgusting smear against Palin was repeated just more than a year ago by the New York Times editorial board when a fan of Bernie Sanders and Rachel Maddow attempted to assassinate Republican members of Congress on June 14, 2017, at a baseball practice in Alexandria, Va.
Only because Capital Police were on hand to protect the third-ranking member of the House leadership, Rep. Steve Scalise, who was gravely wounded in the attack, did we narrowly avoid the worst political bloodbath in our nation’s history.
Unlike the Giffords shooter, the political motivation of the man who attacked the Republican members was splattered all over his social media accounts.
So what did the Times do with this evidence?
Go after Palin, of course.
“Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably,” the Times editorial board wrote the following day. “In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”
The Times was eventually forced to issue a correction that noted there were zero links between Palin and Loughner, and she unsuccessfully sued the paper for defamation. The case was dismissed because she couldn’t prove the editorial writers knew what they were writing was false, despite the fact the claim against Palin had been debunked for years. Turns out ignorance is a defense.
Now, with violence and harassment against members of President Donald Trump’s administration and his supporters on the rise and being actively encouraged by the likes of Rep. Maxine Waters, the Times has decided to throw more gasoline on the fire.
On July 6, in a rallying cry to Democrats to oppose whomever Trump would eventually nominate to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, the editorial board wrote: “This is all the more reason for Democrats and progressives to take a page from “The Godfather” and go to the mattresses on this issue.
“… This call to arms may sound overly dramatic. It’s not.”
“Going to the mattresses” means going to war with rival mafia families.
Whether in the movies or real life, it means blood in the streets. It means a series of attacks and retaliations carried out by mob soldiers who lie low in bare apartments lacking furniture with mattresses on the floor.
If Democrats didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any at all.
We don’t even have to wait to see if the unhinged rhetoric of the left will inspire actual violence. The assassination attempt on Scalise and his fellow Republicans proves it already has.
A man has been arrested for threatening to kill Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and his family over net neutrality. Yes, net neutrality.
Sen. Rand Paul, who was on the baseball field with Scalise getting shot at and later had his ribs broken in an assault by his neighbor, was the subject of additional threats recently and Capital Police arrested a man for threatening to chop him and his family up with an ax.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has now been harassed multiple times in public by progressive activists, who have also gotten in the face of his wife and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.
Simply wearing a Make America Great Again hat is now an invite to assault, as we saw in Texas where a 16-year-old had his ripped off and a drink thrown in his face at a Whataburger by a member of the Texas Green Party.
The anger on the left has boiled over, and as long as the hateful demonization of Republicans keeps up it won’t be long before we see a repeat of the attack at a baseball field.
America will reject the left’s tactics this fall. Republicans will hold the House, expand their majority in the Senate and cement control of the Supreme Court with the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.
To borrow another phrase from “The Godfather” that the Times can understand, Trump is going to settle all family business.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

Gov. Bill Walker and Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott are serious about seeking reelection, but it appears they are abandoning any attempt to win the support of the resource development industry.
How successful their effort will be remains to be seen, but after splitting off GOP votes from former Gov. Sean Parnell in 2014 the new strategy is apparently to siphon votes from Democrat challenger and former Sen. Mark Begich.
Running to the left in 2018 after appealing to Lisa Murkowski moderates as a nonthreatening alternative to Parnell in 2014 is the only explanation for the letter signed by Walker and Mallott submitted to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on June 29.
At the end of the scoping period in preparation for the environmental impact statement process for the proposed Pebble mine, Walker and Mallott asked the Corps to suspend the entire effort.
To be sure, Walker and Mallott declared their opposition to Pebble in 2014, which is not a controversial position to take in Alaska. But members of the resource industry who were willing to overlook that position quickly found out that was the only position he was forthcoming about.
Walker pledged to keep the current process for the Alaska LNG Project on track; instead he immediately began to undermine it to wrest state control from the producers.
After endorsing its repeal, Walker pledged to support the results of the referendum that August that upheld the current oil production tax known as SB 21; instead he introduced a series of oil tax hikes and over two years he vetoed $630 million in payments owed to small oil and gas exploration companies that deepened the state recession and wrecked the state’s credibility with investors.
He also picked a fight over the Prudhoe Bay plan of development — a typically routine annual filing that defines expected drilling and production estimates — by trying to extract detailed information about natural gas sales and marketing from the three owners of the field.
Walker and Mallott clearly don’t believe they’ll be able to fool the industry twice, so they are following Begich’s lead.
Begich gave his position on Pebble to Laine Welch of Fish Radio published June 13 in which he said that the first thing he would do as governor would be to inform the Corps that state lands or right-of-way access would not be granted and that the state would not participate in the effort. That would “finally put an end to this project,” Begich said.
Walker and Mallott wrote in their letter that they will continue to “champion” resource development such as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or building the gas pipeline, however, “the (Pebble Limited Partnership) has yet to demonstrate to us or the Alaska public that they have proposed a feasible and realistic project. Without, at minimum a preliminary economic assessment, but preferably a pre-feasibility study, the Corps will be unable to take a hard look at all reasonable alternatives in the draft EIS.”
Don’t look now, but the exact arguments they make against Pebble can easily be applied to ANWR and Walker’s dream of the gasline.
There is as yet no economic assessment to justify drilling in ANWR, currently in the EIS process, and opponents make the same case that there is no economic rationale for the effort.
Demonstrating a “feasible and realistic project” is also a hurdle the Alaska LNG Project, also in the EIS process, is far from clearing.
The short-circuiting of the permit process to stop projects is the favored strategy of Alaska’s many opponents to responsible development.
Advocating the Corps take just such a step against Pebble reveals the claim to be resource champions as a truly hollow one and betrays their request as the pointless pander that it is.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

The usual ado is being made about so-called “Outside” corporations contributing millions of dollars toward the defeat of the Stand for Salmon initiative that could appear on the ballot this November.
While the Supreme Court ponders the constitutionality of the measure after oral arguments in April with a decision to be issued in September, the companies with billions worth of investments at stake have plunked down $5 million collectively for the opposition group Stand for Alaska as of the most recent public reports.
They include Kinross Gold Corp., which just announced a $100 million expansion of the Fort Knox mine near Fairbanks, and the parent company of the proposed Donlin gold mine that is nearing the end of the environmental review process and has a construction price tag north of $5 billion.
There’s also ConocoPhillips, which has spent billions over the past several years to bring CD-5 into production and to develop the Greater Mooses Tooth-1 project that will start adding oil to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System this year to be followed not long after by Greater Mooses Tooth-2.
Those three combined projects will add nearly 100,000 barrels to the daily throughput of TAPS at no small cost to ConocoPhillips and no small benefit to the state treasury and Permanent Fund.
Other contributors include the owner of the Kensington gold mine near Juneau, which went through a 20-year fight with environmental groups before beginning operations, and the owner of the Red Dog mine in Northwest Alaska that also cleared multiple obstacles by opponents before becoming one of the state’s great resource development success stories.
Yet despite these and other companies’ long histories in Alaska, their tens of thousands in employees, billions in payroll through direct and indirect jobs along with generous contributions to the state’s nonprofits, arts and education programs, they are still cast as “Outsiders” attempting to unfairly use their monetary resources to “exploit” the state.
The refrain has become as tired and predictable as “it’s our oil.”
Even setting aside companies whose headquarters may be located outside the state’s borders, there is no shortage of local companies and groups opposing the measure represented by the Alaska Support Industry Alliance, the Resource Development Council, the Alaska Chamber and the biggest local chambers of commerce in the state including Anchorage, Juneau, Ketchikan and Fairbanks.
There’s also the Alaska Native regional corporations, with the exception of the Pebble-opposition captured Bristol Bay Native Corp., who have joined together against the Stand for Salmon initiative.
All outsiders, right?
The argument is ridiculous on its face, but the attitude is pervasive and it should be no surprise the resource industry that has built Alaska and shoulders virtually the entire burden of taxation is not messing around when it comes to defeating the measure or waiting to see if the Supreme Court does the right thing and strikes it down as an unconstitutional seizure of the Legislature’s authority.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

The major buildup of the U.S. missile defenses at Fort Greely continues, but the possibility their capability will be tested against an attack from North Korea is less now than it was a week ago thanks to President Donald Trump.
Trump’s June 12 summit with Kim Jong Un, though the redundant cast list of media, Democrats and NeverTrumpers predictably tried their best to discredit it, was an unquestionable success of diplomacy the aforementioned Peanut Gallery claimed he’d be incapable of pulling off.
This same clownshoe-clad posse that carried water for President Barack Obama’s deal with Iran bound in cheesecloth and sealed with pallets of cash, his normalization of relations with the Castro brothers and his post-election “flexibility” offer to Vladimir Putin is now attempting to argue with a straight face that Trump was swindled in Singapore.
Giving up nothing more than a photo op and a pause in military exercises with South Korea, the securing of an agreement to finally repatriate the remains of thousands of U.S. casualties in the Korean War represents an achievement no president has managed in 65 years despite several other “deals” with the so-called hermit kingdom.
That’s in addition to the freedom for three American hostages held by the Kim regime achieved without billions of dollars, sanction relief or the release of Taliban leaders that Obama exchanged.
If nothing else comes of this summit, the return of American soldiers to their families is a historic feat on its own.
But there will never be any concession of a Trump victory by his increasingly unhinged opponents, who would probably give up the climate change cause if the president suddenly embraced it.
Trump famously bragged that people would “get tired of winning” if he were elected, yet there’s no sign of fatigue so far either for his supporters or members of the #resistance that apparently still believe screaming “F*** Trump” on live TV will win regular Americans to their cause.
The stock market is up; unemployment is down to record lows across every demographic group including African Americans; wages are rising; and job openings topped the number of people looking for work for the first time ever in April.
Obama once snickered that there’s no “waving a magic wand” to create jobs. He and others scoffed at Trump predicting 3 percent GDP growth. The measly 1.5 percent average growth over Obama’s eight years — the worst of any president since World War II despite near-zero interest rates and trillions in stimulus aided by endless “quantitative easing,” aka printing money, by the Federal Reserve — was dubbed the new normal.
The Atlanta Federal Reserve is projecting GDP growth could top 4 percent for the second quarter.
Meanwhile, the national media continues to drop once proudly-held standards of ethics and best practices in the name of taking Trump down as the intelligence community across the alphabet is concurrently exposed for its malfeasance and treachery under Obama’s watch in the false belief that Hillary Clinton would win and its abuses would never come to light.
Resorting to porn stars and disgraced figures like James Clapper, John Brennan and James Comey has done nothing but backfire upon them all as Trump has let this farce play out with Robert Mueller indicting Russian trolls and nonexistent companies with his dream team of Democrat-donating lawyers and exiled lovebird agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
The same media that forced the revelation of Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s clients after Mueller’s lackeys in New York raided his office now howl with indignation when one of their cohort had her phone and email metadata seized after it was discovered she was sleeping with her source that was illegally leaking classified information from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Schadenfreude doesn’t even begin to capture the karmic tail-kicking being administered to Trump’s ankle-nipping pursuers.
House Misery Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-lusional, has called the tax relief “crumbs”, defended the “spark of divinity” in MS-13 gang members and poo-pooed the jobs numbers with a sarcastic “hip hip hooray.” Democrats are running on tax hikes, open borders and impeachment with billionaire Tom Steyer proving that there is actually a bigger waste of money for rich guys than donating it to Jeb Bush.
Good luck with that.
The RNC is flush; the DNC is broke. Half the Democrats in the Senate are up for reelection but their adherence to Chuck Schumer’s obstruction strategy will likely have them in Washington during August voting against Trump’s nominees while 10 GOP challengers in states won by Trump get the field to themselves.
Wile E. Coyote hatched better plans.
And somewhere, Jim Acosta is crying in the shower.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

The May 16 vote in the U.S. Senate to reverse the Federal Communications Commission repeal of “net neutrality” rules produced a split from Alaska’s delegation with Sen. Lisa Murkowski joining 49 Democrats and Sen. Dan Sullivan voting with his Republican colleagues.
The Democrats’ rare victory in the Senate was a small one, however, as there is not support in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives or from President Donald Trump, who appointed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, to restore the 2015 net neutrality rules.
Democrats want to make a campaign issue out of net neutrality with tech-savvy millennials by portraying it as a battle of David vs. Goliath with giant internet service providers in one corner and would-be innovators supposedly in danger of being throttled or blocked in the other.
In fact, net neutrality boils down to a battle of Goliath vs. Goliath with the ISPs facing off against the dominant content providers known as FANG: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google.
According to Canadian bandwidth management systems vendor Sandvine, those four companies combine to take up some 56 percent percent of all internet traffic during peak periods, with Netflix taking the lion’s share of that number at about 36 percent. Next up is YouTube, owned by Google, at about 15 percent.
Netflix had become such a bandwidth hog by 2014 that ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon started slowing down its streaming video; that forced Netflix to sign deals with them to pay a toll so its customers could enjoy faster speeds.
Those deals were voided under the 2015 net neutrality rules that required all traffic to be treated the same regardless of whether it was a blogger or a corporate behemoth like Netflix with 125 million customers.
That was a huge win for content providers who were able to go back to free-riding on the infrastructure built by the ISPs while continuing to charge customers for the services they provide over that same infrastructure.
In practice, so far as the content providers are concerned, net neutrality is akin to “highway neutrality” if all road traffic was treated the same regardless of weight, length, value, etc. Of course we all understand that not all road traffic causes the same impact and therefore users pay different fees, tolls, taxes and the like.
Google doesn’t pay anything for using about one-sixth of the available bandwidth during peak hours, but it definitely charges for YouTube TV and for ad placements on that content flowing through the ISPs.
Netflix is using more than a third of the available broadband and likewise pays nothing for the privilege while raking in billions per month in subscriber revenue.
If anything leads to “throttling” of internet speeds it would be two companies who are using almost half of the available bandwidth.
The fears of ISPs throttling or blocking content are overblown to be sure, but speaking of net “neutrality,” does anyone believe companies like Google, Facebook or Twitter are “neutral”?
Google manipulates search results. Facebook and Twitter have gotten into the speech censorship business by blocking users and the practice of “shadowbanning.”
The corporate leadership and culture of these companies are overwhelmingly, outwardly, proudly, left-wing in nature.
They are by far the dominant platforms for search and social interactions and there is no shortage of incidences of them using their clout for ideological purposes.
In 2012, President Barack Obama’s reelection team was praised for its ability to microtarget voters by scraping data from millions of Facebook profiles, and the company did nothing about it. In 2016, that became a scandal when Cambridge Analytica did the same thing on behalf of then-candidate Trump.
YouTube has “demonetized” conservative users; Facebook curtailed the page for the popular duo of African-American Trump fans Diamond and Silk; Twitter similarly polices progressive speech far more loosely than it does that of the right.
So-called “net neutrality” does nothing to address the lack of neutrality when it comes to political speech exhibited by the Silicon Valley titans who claim to be for a free and open internet with them as champions of open public platforms. They have revealed themselves to be anything but.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

Chronicling political hypocrisy is typically no more difficult than shooting the idiomatic fish in a barrel.
And sometimes the fish jump in front of the bullets.
Such is the case with the 11th-hour hijacking of a bill to update Alaska’s alcoholic beverage regulations known as Title 4.
In the works for six years to develop points of consensus among stakeholders, Senate Bill 76 was sent to the House in a unanimous vote on April 30.
Less than a week later, a former bar owner, Rep. Louise Stutes of Kodiak, and a current bar owner, Rep. Adam Wool of Fairbanks, were aided in passing an amendment aimed at cutting a leg out from under popular craft tasting rooms by the reliably anti-business Rep. Andy Josephson of Anchorage and the reliably unremarkable Rep. Gary Knopp of Kenai.
A parade of bar owners testified on May 2 to the House Labor and Finance Committee with their complaints about the success of craft beer and spirit tasting rooms.
Despite having very limited hours to serve no more than 36 ounces of beer or 3 ounces of spirits to a single customer, and prohibited from offering any entertainment such as televisions, live music or even a pool table, these craft tasting rooms have apparently unlocked the secret to success: offering a product people want in an atmosphere they enjoy.
To hear the bar owners tell it, though, these crafty craft room owners are simply succeeding because they have the unfair advantage of not paying upward of $250,000 for a beverage dispensary license.
These sneaky entrepreneurs have apparently discovered a loophole in the system whereby they can pay $3,000 for a brewery license to sell those three beers per day per customer after investing a half-million dollars or more in tanks, equipment, ingredients, payroll, construction and transportation costs.
Were it not for the real world implications of such a transparent effort to pinch the profitability of another part of the industry he inhabits, Wool’s naked self-dealing would be laugh-out-loud comedy.
Wool, as you may recall, was the lead sponsor of the bill that green lit the operation of ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft in Alaska during the 2017 half of this legislative session.
At the time, and to this day, the one-time occupiers of a government-created and once-protected monopoly in the taxi business screamed to the high heavens to no avail that Uber and Lyft would enjoy unfair competitive advantages of less regulation while offering the same service and without the burden of purchasing the expensive and limited number of permits.
The arguments by the taxi lobby aren’t much different than those being raised by the bar industry, but in an ultimate irony they held more water then than they do now.
Unlike the craft tasting rooms versus bars, Uber and Lyft occupy the exact same space in the transportation industry as taxis do without the same cost of entry to the business.
That didn’t mean much to Wool, who cited long waits for taxis as a reason for his support for the bill. No doubt his bottom line has benefitted over the past year since as a customer or two at his bar may have been more willing to have that last cocktail with the knowledge a ride home was just a click and a few minutes away.
But now that his fellow industry travelers have an opening to stick it to competitors rather than pondering what may make a tasting room a more popular option for some customers and adjusting their business accordingly, Wool and Stutes are doing their bidding by attempting to slash crafters’ potential revenue by a third with no corresponding benefit to bar owners.
Wool actually called the one-third reduction a “compromise,” which begs the question: a compromise from what?
If customers are expressing a clear preference for local brews and spirits, perhaps the solution for bar owners would be to serve more of those options rather than further limiting the amounts available just feet from the tanks in a hamhanded attempt to force them into their businesses.
What the bar owners are arguing would be like souvenir shops in Homer complaining that Salty Dawg is cutting into their hoodie sales, or Fred Meyer whining that farmers’ markets hurt its produce department.
Hopefully House Finance will strip this amendment out of the bill, or it will get killed on the floor, but even if the bill is held until next session that would be a preferable alternative than to reward the worst of legislative tactics being plied by Stutes and Wool.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

Those responsible for recruiting teachers to Alaska have a funny way of going about it.
In this issue we quote Gateway School District Superintendent Scott MacManus, who says Alaska is “not competitive” for pay and that its 401k system for teachers is “not seen favorably.”
Given that public position you have to wonder what exactly is MacManus’ pitch to prospective teachers at job fairs if he thinks conditions are so horrible for teachers in Alaska.
Alaska teachers on average make $67,433 per year according to 2016 data compiled by the National Education Association, which is about $10,000 more than the average wage for all occupations in the state and nearly $9,000 more than the national average for teachers.
While teacher advocates complain about the state cost of living, they fail to note there are no state income, sales or property taxes.
There is also a complaint that teachers aren’t eligible for Social Security. That stems from a decision that goes back to the 1950s when Alaska elected to create a pension system for public employees rather than opt in to the Social Security system. (Correction: Teachers in Alaska were covered in the territory under the Teacher Retirement System. After the Social Security Act was amended in 1950 to allow public employees to enroll, the territory expanded retirement benefits to all of its non-TRS employees by signing a Federal Social Security Agreement. This benefit for governmental employees was later offered by the territorial legislature to employees of political subdivisions across the State, excluding members of TRS, and the agreements continued after statehood in 1959. In 1978, the public employees opted to end their participation in Social Security with the agreement the state would develop an alternative plan. Source: State of Alaska Division of Retirment and Benefits)
While it’s true teachers aren’t eligible for Social Security, they are also not subject to paying 6.2 percent of their income in the payroll tax, which increases their take home income by more than $4,100 per year for the average salary.
The more than 3,000 teachers in the Anchorage School District, by far the largest in the state, pay nothing toward their health insurance premiums that are nearly $1,600 per month.
With an 8 percent 401k match from the state, that adds up to an additional $5,400 benefit for the average salary each year. Financial planners advise saving 10 percent to 15 percent of income per year toward retirement; Alaska teachers are able to put away 16 percent of their income annually.
In sum, teachers in Alaska earn more than the average worker, they pay less in taxes and health insurance premiums then the average worker, and they have a more generous 401k match than virtually any other worker.
(Without knowing the details of every private company 401k program it’s impossible to say nobody else receives an 8 percent match, but it is safe to say those who do are exceedingly few in number.)
But to hear MacManus and NEA Alaska President Tim Parker tell it, every state has a better pension system than Alaska because it is the only one that uses a 401k program instead of a defined benefit system.
Teachers have been striking in states across the country, and a May 1 Associated Press article headline noted the reason: “High pension costs lurk behind US teacher push for more pay.”
School districts around the nation including Alaska have racked up a half-trillion — yes, $500 billion — in pension liabilities.
That means teachers’ wages are being frozen to pay down debts for current retirees and having their own future benefits cut.
“I think what you see happening in the state and local and municipal sector is it has now become very, very clear how expensive defined benefit plans are. I think we’re headed for a big crisis across the country,” said Olivia Mitchell, executive director of the Pension Research Council at the University of Pennsylvania, according to the AP story.
“Pensions are now becoming the tail that wags the government dog, if you will.”
Three nonpartisan think tanks that have examined the issue — which don’t have a stake in Alaska teacher income — all grade the state 401k system as far better for new teachers than the pensions that are bankrupting other states.
Alaska was one of only nine states that didn’t get an “F” from Bellweather Education Partners; the Urban Policy Institute gave Alaska a “B” for new teacher hires; and the National Center for Teacher Quality gave Alaska the only “A” grade in the country for creating a portable, 401k-style plan for new teachers in which they get to keep 100 percent of their retirement savings compared to the national average of 28 percent.
According to NEA data, only two states and the District of Columbia spend more per student than Alaska and no state spends more as a percentage of total income than Alaska.
That raises the question there doesn’t seem to be an answer to from those arguing for more pay and a generous defined benefit pension system: how much is enough?
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

Other than projecting relentless optimism about the prospects for the Alaska LNG Project, the second constant from its leadership and proponents has been criticism of the press coverage it receives.
Over and over we’ve heard Alaska Gasline Development Corp. President Keith Meyer rip the news coverage of the project as overly negative and damaging in foreign markets.
In this issue we share an opinion piece by two advocates for the Alaska LNG Project who are now channeling Meyer’s press critiques, this time on the topic of the state’s trade relationship with China.
“We should celebrate being an international exporter and be concerned when local voices speak negatively about our business partners around the world,” write the authors Doug Griffin and Tim Dillon of the Southeast Alaska Municipal Conference and the Kenai Economic Development District, respectively. “… As Alaskan economic development entities, we envision a future where we see more and more headlines telling a positive Alaska-China story.”
Touting Gov. Bill Walker’s upcoming trade mission to China, the authors note the country’s status as the state’s biggest export destination with $1.32 billion in products last year, just more than 60 percent of that in seafood.
Meyer spent a lot of time in China over the past year-plus working on a deal that culminated in the signing of an agreement last November outlining a framework that could have the country investing in up to 75 percent of the project costs in exchange for 75 percent of the LNG it will produce.
On the surface, anything that helps turn the dream of unlocking the vast North Slope gas resource into a reality is a positive step. China does need cleaner energy as it has begun literally choking on its own pollution and has more than enough financial resources to invest.
Beyond that, there is every reason to air concerns about the terms China will attempt to extract in exchange for its majority-share investment and what the Walker administration would cede to China in the name of building the project he’s pursued for some 30 years.
And let’s get real: China is not Japan or Korea, Alaska’s No. 2 and 3 trading partners who are also geopolitical allies.
The list is virtually endless when it comes to China’s human rights violations, its cyberattacks on and intellectual property theft from U.S. companies, its currency manipulation, its evading of sanctions on North Korea, its military aggression and expansion in the South China Sea, and so on.
Griffin and Dillon don’t even acknowledge China’s bad behavior on these numerous fronts, and appear to want the press, legislators and business stakeholders to ignore these issues entirely in the name of increasing Alaska trade regardless of who it is with.
They also don’t mention that the vast majority of those seafood exports are reprocessed in China and sold elsewhere through value-adding that we should aim to happen in Alaska and not celebrate as a penultimate trade achievement.
China is ruthlessly aggressive in pursuing its economic, political and military interests and it does not make deals that go against them. A healthy concern or even skepticism is hardly unwarranted when it comes to making a $40 billion-deal with the Communist leaders of the world’s largest economy.
The Walker administration is also asking for unlimited receipt authority for AGDC to accept third-party funds as its stash of previous state appropriations dwindles and its leaders have made the political decision to not seek more money from a cash-strapped state treasury.
Preserving legislative oversight of the deals AGDC is making and what pieces of state resources it contemplates trading in order to advance the project are entirely appropriate and vital to upholding the constitutional mandate to develop resources for the maximum benefit of Alaskans.
Just four years ago Walker was accusing former Gov. Sean Parnell of playing election-year politics for his moves to advance the Alaska LNG Project as an equity consortium with the three major North Slope producers and TransCanada.
Now as Walker pursues reelection his surrogates are asking critics of his plan to be quiet about the path he’s pursuing and with whom he is pursuing it.
The Alaska LNG Project will not — and should not — rise or fall based on the press coverage it receives or the amount of skepticism voiced in the Legislature or business community about its economics or the prospect of dealing with China.
Working the press and leaning on skeptics to keep quiet in the name of more “positive headlines” isn’t going to get the Alaska LNG Project built and it comes off as a sign of weakness more than strength.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

Nobody could blame Rep. Justin Parish for loving the sound of his own voice.
The problem is that everything that comes out of the Juneau Democrat’s mouth regarding oil taxes following his baritone “Madam Chair” reveals a depth of knowledge that is shallower than a contact lens case.
Parish was on full, cringe-worthy display at a couple recent hearings of the House Resources Committee, where co-chair Rep. Geran Tarr, D-Anchorage, is forcing oil industry representatives to hump to Juneau yet again for more hearings on another oil tax bill that’s going nowhere.
If these hearings are good for anything — other than serving as a constant reminder that the state is on track to see its third straight year of production increases on the North Slope — it is to witness the Democrat-led Majority’s utter cluelessness on policy from definitional basics to more complex financial reporting.
First up was Parish questioning Tax Division Director Ken Alper, whom Democrats have relied upon since taking the House majority in 2016 to help craft their seemingly endless series of oil tax increases.
At the Jan. 26 hearing, Alper had an innocuous PowerPoint slide that noted Tarr’s proposal to raise the gross minimum tax from 4 percent to 7 percent is a 75 percent increase.
Parish, who once wrote that “French is the international language of freedom,” decided to wade into the universal language of math.
“We are contemplating increasing the effective rate by 3 percent,” Parish said. “It’s such a curious quirk of language. Because if we were increasing it from 1 percent to 2 percent, you could say we’re increasing the effective tax rate by 100 percent.”
Alper agreed, “Yes, doubling it.”
“Which just, on the face sounds like we’re going up to an effective tax rate of 101 percent,” Parish said. “Which is positively bizarre. I would ask you in the future not to muddle things by saying we’re increasing the effective tax rate by 75 percent when on the face of it you’d think we’re going from a 4 percent gross tax to a 79 percent tax rate, which is also a plain language reading of what you have here.”
The only thing muddled is Parish’s thinking but the problem is his muddled thinking came along with an instruction to Alper to refrain from using math because it accurately portrays the size of the tax increase Tarr is proposing.
Parish wasn’t done yet, and saved some of his best column material for BP Vice President Lewis Westwick a few days later on Jan. 29.
Just five minutes earlier, Westwick had responded to Rep. George Rauscher, R-Wasilla, who gave him an opportunity to address Parish’s statement at the Jan. 26 hearing that BP earned 74 percent of its global profits in Alaska in 2016.
The original source of that claim is from the Journal itself, when BP reported results for its upstream business of $85 million. The company only made $115 million worldwide that year, leading us to draw the same erroneous conclusion that Parish is still quoting two years later.
In fact, our subsequent reporting based on an email we obtained written by BP Alaska President Janet Weiss corrected the record to reflect BP’s annual report did not break out the results from its midstream business, namely TAPS and its marine tanker business.
“We made a loss of almost $200 million,” Westwick said, which jives with Weiss’ statement of a $184 million loss in her email. “Despite seeing a positive $85 million in the annual report, that’s just a slice of our Alaska business.”
Turns out Parish’s listening skills are about as good as his math skills.
“I wonder, if about 74 percent of BP’s global profits as your documents to your shareholders I presume assert, how can it be said we’re not competitive when we account for, again, about 74 percent of global profits according to your documents and yet only 1 percent of global production,” Parish said. “I really would be interested in knowing.”
Westwick was as pleasant as could be and even graciously took the blame for Parish’s ignorant question.
“As I tried to explain, perhaps not very well,” Westwick said, “the $85 million is just a slice of the Alaska business. It would be akin to taking your best well and saying, ‘this is how I’m going to report my financials.’ The actual entirety of the Alaska business lost money in 2016, which for legal reasons around disclosure, we don’t disclose in the annual report. In 2016, the way we look at the Alaska business, we made a loss of almost $200 million. It would not represent, as you describe, 75 percent of the total group profit.”
Parish does represent, unfortunately, the people of Juneau. Surely they can do better.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

The only thing surprising about U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinding the Obama administration’s policy of nonenforcement in states that have legalized recreational use of marijuana is how many people acted surprised by it.
A law-and-order Attorney General who stands in stark contrast to his lawless predecessors Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder and who has made it one of his missions to go after sanctuary cities for ignoring federal immigration laws was never going to maintain an official policy of doing the same for marijuana.
To his credit, Sessions did not make enforcement of federal marijuana laws one of his national priorities and simply tasked the U.S. attorneys in each state to follow existing principles for prosecutions. The Alaska U.S. attorney announced nothing would change, as did his counterpart in Colorado where recreational marijuana for adults is also legal under state law.
The pro-cannabis crowd was quick to jump on Sessions for withdrawing the Cole memo issued in 2013, but they should be thanking him instead.
What Sessions did was to send the issue where it rightly belongs and shined a bright light on Congress to finally do something about reconciling the conflict between states that have legalized medicinal and/or recreational use and the laws on the books classifying the drug alongside heroin and cocaine.
Truly, it is an amazing thing to hear those with the power to change the law demanding the Attorney General not do his job because they have failed to do theirs.
Overall, 29 states have legalized medicinal marijuana; eight states plus the District of Columbia have legalized recreational use; and 18 states allow for the use of cannabinoid oil, also known as CBD, which is non-psychoactive.
Together that is more than 40 states with some kind of law conflicting with federal law, which should in theory create a super majority of elected officials that could change the law in bipartisan fashion.
Instead, Congress has been content to sit on the sidelines relying on federal nonenforcement, which is neither proper nor sustainable.
When pressed in the past, Congress has acted to protect state laws on marijuana.
As the Obama Justice Department and affiliated agencies were conducting hundreds of raids on marijuana dispenseries around the nation that were otherwise in compliance with state laws, Congress began passing amendments to annual spending bills that prohibited any money from being spent on such prosecutions.
The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment has been included in every spending bill since 2014. Another amendment to Veterans’ Affairs spending bills has also prohibited the VA from sanctioning doctors who talk to patients about potential benefits of marijuana in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
In short, Congress has found the will to allow certain uses of marijuana already and now will be forced to go further because of Sessions’ action.
Rep. Don Young has been at the forefront of this issue and is a co-founder of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus that is seeking to recognize states’ rights to regulate marijuana as they see fit and to open the banking system to legally operating businesses.
Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan have suggested it may be a bridge too far to take marijuana off the Schedule I list under the Controlled Substances Act, but that should be the easiest call. Keeping it listed alongside the highly-addictive and far more dangerous heroin and cocaine makes no sense given what’s been seen in Alaska and elsewhere it has been legalized.
After a voter initiative to legalize recreational use for adults in Alaska somewhat narrowly in 2014, there have been four efforts at the local level to turn back the clock. In the conservative Matanuska-Susitna Valley, in Fairbanks and on the Kenai Peninsula voters have overwhelmingly voted to keep the cannabis business legal.
Not everything has gone perfectly in Alaska, with the recent issue of testing inconsistencies rising before the Marijuana Control Board to address, but there have hardly been any of the deleterious effects opponents warned of before the 2014 vote.
Sessions is no fan of marijuana, and Alaska’s congressional delegation are always quick to point out they don’t advocate for its use either, but that is irrelevant. The people have spoken loud and clear across the nation and it’s time for Congress to start listening, and respond with action.
Andrew Jensen can be reached at [email protected]

Just a few days remain in 2017, and what a year it has been since the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
While the Alaska Legislature still can’t agree on a solution to the state’s budget woes and has nearly run out of the politically-accessible savings accounts, in a welcome change it has had no bigger friend than the leader of the executive branch in Washington, D.C.
As this column was being written the news came that a bill is on its way to Trump’s desk to massively overhaul the tax system and hand Alaska its longtime, No. 1 goal of opening the coastal plain of …
ANWR: The Democrats in the Senate couldn’t stop it this time, nor could their allies in the environmental extremist movement. We are a long way from first oil, and the lawsuit machine is no doubt cranking up, but there can be no doubt that the prospect of opening up another Prudhoe Bay bodes well for Alaska’s future.
Budget battle: The Legislature spent a record 211 days in session this year, partly thanks to its divided houses’ inability to compromise and partly because of Gov. Bill Walker’s October special session that transformed from a supposed “revenue” session to a referendum on the criminal justice reform bill passed barely a year earlier.
Cannabis: The sky hasn’t fallen in Alaska after the legalization of cannabis in 2014, with the first legal sale in October 2016. Prohibitionists have attempted to overturn the state vote in the Mat-Su, on the Kenai Peninsula and in Fairbanks, but voters have resoundingly rejected every effort to turn back the clock.
Dean Don: Rep. Don Young assumed the title of “Dean of the House” after Michigan Rep. John Conyers was forced to resign amid multiple sexual harassment allegations and settlements of those allegations. There’s no shortage of legendary stories about Young over his four decades in Congress — including one that surfaced this year about brandishing a knife at former Speaker John Boehner — but thankfully none that resemble the daily revelations coming out of DC, Hollywood and New York.
EIS: Probably more Alaskans know what EIS stands for than any other state population, and environmental impact statements are now underway for the Liberty offshore Arctic project, the Nanushuk onshore discovery by Armstrong and the 211-mile road to the Ambler mining district.
Fake news: The media created this term in order to discredit Trump’s win, and the president has turned it into a club to bash the ever-shrinking credibility of an industry once regarded as a check on power that is not even bothering to hide its progressive agenda anymore.
GDP: After never crossing the 3 percent growth mark in eight years under President Barack Obama, GDP has steadily averaged 3 percent under Trump as the stock market soars. Even before tax reform passed the Federal Reserve now estimates fourth quarter GDP will be 4 percent.
Harassment: The story of the year, as the mountain of allegations against Hollywood mogul and Democrat heavyweight Harvey Weinstein has unleashed a tsunami of pent-up accusations that shows no signs yet of ebbing that have brought down some of the biggest names in media, politics and entertainment who have largely spent years portraying themselves as champions of women’s rights.
ISIS: After Obama downplayed the rise of ISIS and sat by as it ran roughshod over Iraq and Syria committing atrocity after atrocity, less than a year after Trump became Commander-in-Chief the “caliphate” has been routed from its capitals of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. Although much like the GDP numbers, the media isn’t much interested in reporting on this tremendous military success.
Jerusalem: Yes, it is the capital of Israel and yet another example of Trump keeping a promise where his predecessors going back to Bill Clinton have not. If you haven’t watched UN Ambassador Nikki Haley give it to the Security Council, it is worth a view for the refreshing sound of a nation that is unashamed of exercising its sovereignty rather than be cowed by the constraints of “international opinion.”
King Cove: The road is on its way to being built, again to the consternation of environmental groups who care not a whit for the people of the region and would not live for a minute under the conditions they want to impose on others.
LNG: Gov. Bill Walker got some serious face time in China with its president and Trump. Whether the joint development agreement with the Chinese corporations is simply a memorandum of understanding by another name will become more clear in the coming year.
Media meltdown: A continuation on the fake news, the more the media protests like Fredo Corleone that it is smart and wants respect, the more they trample on their own feet trying to unearth the smoking gun on Russian collusion by Trump. There have been nearly as many corrections, retractions and resignations surrounding the Trump-Russia story as there have been sexual harassment allegations.
Nanushuk: The discovery by Armstrong Energy keeps getting bigger. Now estimated at more than 2 billion barrels while still barely delineated, the record amounts bid per acre in the formation at the state lease sale bodes well for future production regardless of how long it takes to develop ANWR.
Obamacare: The biggest GOP debacle of the year, Obamacare still exists as the law of the land after Congress failed to repeal and replace it this past summer despite seven years of promises of what Republicans would do if they had the House, Senate and White House. The individual mandate repeal is a start but fixing the broken system is a huge item still on the to-do list.
PFD: For the second year in a row it was set below the statutory formula, this time by the Legislature after Walker vetoed half of it in 2016 and had his action upheld by the Supreme Court. The fight to enshrine it in the Constitution is now on, and is likely to be led by the unlikely duo of arch-conservative Sen. Mike Dunleavy and staunch liberal Sen. Bill Wielechowski in the coming year.
Quintillion: The Anchorage telecom has completed its Arctic fiber network around the coast of Alaska and turned on its high-speed service Dec. 1. By any measure an impressive infrastructure accomplishment, rural Alaska has another entry to the information superhighway.
Rocket Man: Trump being Trump, he called the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man” in a speech to the UN after several missile tests and a nuclear test over the past year. The missiles are showing increasing ability to reach the US mainland and that means a huge amount of federal dollars are going to be flowing to Alaska as the first line of defense at Fort Greely.
Salmon: A bountiful harvest of salmon in virtually every area of the state was a highlight of 2017, with record harvest of chum in the Northwest in a boon to that area’s limited economy. The downsides were Cook Inlet reds and Southeast kings, neither of which look better in 2018.
Tax cuts: The media has trashed the tax overhaul constantly, and is pointing to their polls of the public who has heard nothing good from them about the bill. We’ll see how the polling looks as soon as February when nearly every paycheck gets bigger thanks to less withholding.
Uber: Alaska became the last state in the nation to allow ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft to operating here. In a rare wise move, the Legislature prohibited local jurisdictions from piling regulations on top of the companies.
Virgin: Alaska Airlines closed on its deal to acquire Virgin America and is still experiencing some growing pains, but the company has the cash, the assets and the management to iron them out.
Waiver: One of the few worthwhile aspects of the Affordable Care Act ended up benefitting Alaska when Health and Human Services approved an innovation waiver to help cover the costs of the state reinsurance program. It’s a simple redirection of federal subsidies from premium support to paying high-cost claims, but it is a model that can work elsewhere by giving states more control.
Xtra revenue: Better prices and higher production have the state projected to take in $250 million more than previously expected after the Revenue Department released its latest forecast on Dec. 12.
Yakutat: An interesting exploration project is going on at Icy Cape near Yakutat with potentially huge deposit of heavy minerals such as garnet. The big positive is that no major processing or leeching is needed to extract what could produce millions per year in revenue for the Mental Health Trust that owns the land.
Zinke: Nearly an honorary Alaskan at this point, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has ordered the resource review of NPR-A and ANWR, elevated the King Cove road to a high priority and tapped Alaskans Joe Balash, Tara Sweeney and Steve Wackowski to join his staff.